Chris M.

We had a case where some small ants were showing up in our kitchen. I put down some ant bait and thought it could be interesting to look at a time lapse of the ants gathering the bait over a period of several hours. I've got an old GoPro Hero 4 that can record a time lapse at 4k, so I set that up on a little GoPro tripod thing, plugged in a battery pack and started recording. Several hours later I started editing and quickly realized that I had missed a few things in terms of preparation, oops! Let me point out a few of them here in the hope that you can avoid these issues if and when you record a time lapse. Inconsistent lighting As soon as I started editing it became apparent that pretty much each frame differed greatly in brightness. I'm guessing this was due to clouds. It took hours in post-processing to adjust add key frames to adjust the brightness thousands of frames. While the final result looked much better, avoiding the issue entirely with consistent brightn...

In February, 2014 I wrote an article about Apple's lack of support of NFC and their use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based iBeacons . Well, I was totally wrong! Samsung introduced NFC support in the Galaxy S3 in May 2012. Apple held out until September 2014 when the iPhone 6 was released with NFC support. Since then Apple Pay, using NFC functionality on the iPhone to make payments, has gotten huge.

Mental models are a valuable tool for engineers. I do engineering as a day job. Often diagrams, drawings, and other visuals will be created to help convey information to customers and facilitate discussions. Visuals, while always leaving out some details, and in fact the challenge of creating visuals being knowing what details to leave out, helps immensely with audience engagement. gitGraph commit commit branch feature commit commit commit checkout main commit commit merge feature A random git feature branch development model diagram A visual's layout, colors, blocks, arrows etc are far easier to consume than a wall of text. In spite of their relative simplicity when compared to text, they can be constructed to represent complex systems, relationships, processes etc. We create a lot of visuals to help convey information to others, are we using them enough when conveying information to ourselves? st...